


Newly Human

by punkengineer



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Gen, mentions of depression, mentions of self harm, tatooed!Cas
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-08-13
Updated: 2015-08-13
Packaged: 2018-04-14 11:25:24
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 785
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4562823
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/punkengineer/pseuds/punkengineer
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Cas fell. He doesn't take to humanity very well at first, but he finds a way to cope.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Newly Human

When Castiel fell from grace, he hated his new body. He was stuck in Jimmy Novak's skin, and that caused a few problems. He counted himself lucky that he wasn't bothered by Jimmy's body being "male." No, he was more bothered by the fact that Jimmy's skin was smooth; he had no scars, no marks of any kind, and that made him feel all kinds of wrong. He had been through so many battles before he fell, and his true form had been so scarred from the millennia of war after war that by the time he fell he was more scar tissue than anything else. He spent the first couple months as a human trying to make himself feel more at home in his body by scarring it as close as he could get to how his angelic body was scarred. It was difficult, because his angelic form was very different from his human one. The only reason he stopped is because Dean found out and wouldn't let him near anything even remotely sharp until trying became more trouble than it was worth, and he gave up. He sunk into a depression after that. He was lethargic and apathetic, he would hardly leave his room.

Dean finally decided that leaving Cas alone in the bunker wasn't helping his situation any. If anything, it was making it worse. So he took Cas with him on his next hunt, just to give him a change of scenery. He didn't take him on the actual hunt, of course. He let him stay in the motel room, or wander around the town, as long as he promised not to hurt himself. So Cas spent the time that Dean was off researching for the case wandering around the town, not really going anywhere, just walking. Getting used to how his human senses worked, how they differed from his angelic ones.

While he was wandering, he came across a tattoo shop. The art he could see from the windows looked interesting, so he went inside. He couldn't get anything done, of course, he only had ten dollars, which Dean had emphasized was only to be used to buy lunch. So he looked at the art on the walls, and he talked to the artists. He learned why they do what they do, what the art means to them. And he fell in love with the idea. When he told Dean about it on the way back to Kansas, Dean told him that he was insane, but to go ahead and go for it, it was a hell of a lot more healthy than carving up his entire body.

Castiel's first tattoo was angel’s wings, spread open as if in flight, starting near his spine and stretching outward so the tips of them brushed his elbows. He wanted to remember his wings, they had been a part of him, and he didn't want to lose that. 

Cas got his second tattoo a little over a year later. An asexual pride flag on his inner forearm, by his elbow. He had never been ashamed of the parts of him that were different, and he decided to make the invisible parts of himself he considered to be important to who he was visible, because he didn’t see a point in hiding something that he considered to be an integral part of who he was.

It took him two more years after that to get his third tattoo. A hunt they’d been on hadn’t gone as smoothly as they’d planned, and Cas had come close to dying. For the first time since he’d been newly fallen, he considered his own mortality. As an angel, he’d been the force of God’s will, a warrior of heaven. It would have been an honor to die in the fight to carry out divine justice. Now, he wasn’t so sure that dying would bring him the same praise from those he had once called kin. He recalled a story from the bible, the story of Saint Peter. Peter had demanded to be crucified upside down, because he didn’t think himself worthy to die in the same manner as Jesus. Castiel felt like he and Peter were sort of kindred spirits in that sense. He no longer felt worthy of the rights he would have received had he died doing his duty. So at his next chance, he went out and got a Saint Peter's cross tattooed on his chest, the main post going from a couple inches below his clavicle to just above his navel. He needed the reminder that while he may be unworthy of his once-rightful place in heaven, he can still be a good man.


End file.
